This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

Smaller high schools are better than larger ones. "In particular, the researchers found that the schools boosted college enrollment for black males by 11.3 percentage points, a 36 percent increase relative to their control group counterparts."

"What is truly remarkable about these results is that a high school reform has had a measurable effect on college-going and it has done so at scale — across scores of public high schools," said Gordon Berlin, the president of MDRC.

Abstract

This review examined 57 post-1990
empirical studies of school size effects on a variety of student and
organizational outcomes.
The weight of evidence provided by this research
clearly favors smaller schools. Students who traditionally struggle at
school
and students from disadvantaged social and economic
backgrounds are the major benefactors of smaller schools. Elementary
schools
with large proportions of such students should be
limited in size to not more than about 300 students; those serving
economically
and socially heterogeneous or relatively advantaged
students should be limited in size to about 500 students. Secondary
schools
serving exclusively or largely diverse and/or
disadvantaged students should be limited in size to about 600 students
or fewer,
while those secondary schools serving economically
and socially heterogeneous or relatively advantaged students should be
limited in size to about 1,000 students.